Thursday, July 07, 2005

Grey city, stubbornly implanted,
Taken so for granted for a thousand years.
Stay, city; smokily enchanted,
Cradle of our memories and hopes and fears.
Every blitz your resistance toughening,
From the Ritz to the Anchor and Crown,
Nothing ever could override the pride of London Town.

6 comments:

Abigail Nussbaum said...

Glad you checked in, Andrew.

Although, now that I think of it, I don't even know where in England you live.

Andrew Rilstone said...

...and George Galloway wins the first "I told you so" award of the day.

Joe said...

George Galloway's comments were disgraceful. He should be tried for treason just as Lord Haw Haw was at the end of World War II

Unknown said...

The visions of destruction on my TV, which a few sick and broken people worked so hard to bring about, are put instantly to shame by the calm bravery, cooperation and competence of the people of London.

Abigail Nussbaum said...

Oh, without question. As an Israeli I tend to think that my countrymen have grokked the suicide bombing phenomenon in fullness, but today I saw something that made me wonder. CNN was interviewing a man who'd been on one of the tube trains. He'd been trapped in a dark, hot, smoke-filled carriage for I don't know how long, convinced of his impending death, uncertain of what exactly had happened.

He was ashen and shaken and his voice broke more than once, but for several minutes he spoke intelligently and articulately about his experience. At one point he criticized the emergency services, and then stopped to say that, after all, he was in shock and might not have the right perspective.

It was humbling, and inspiring at the same time.

Phil Masters said...

I think that North Ireland is a good lesson of what Iraq will be like. The violence will stop when the people who lived under Saddam have all died of Age, and when their children have grown to old to care.

Not a good analogy, I'm afraid. The vast majority of Iraqis seem to be very happy to get shot of Saddam, and will apparently say so to anyone taking an opinion survey. If the insurgency was entirely down to nostalgia for the good old days of Baathist rule, there'd be no trouble.

However, wanting shot of a bad man is one thing; wanting a foreign army marching in, turning trigger-happy, building bases, and telling you how to run your own country, is quite another. Especially when the invaders are from a different cultural and religious background. Human beings quite be quite insanely resentful of that sort of thing, whatever the real alternatives.

Despite which, the insurgency is still pretty clearly down to a minority of the Iraqi population. Unfortunately, you can also throw in fanatical factions from the assorted neo-Islamic death cults who Saddam kept out of the country, but who've now cheerfully come back, and maybe some elements from Saddam's old support base with nothing much to lose, and you've got a lethally dangerous minority insurgency - who can in turn exploit the deep cultural divisions within Iraq (and a large religious minority with a long-standing political whip hand over the religious majority is one bit which could recall our own dear Ulster).

The children who are born into democracy there will be the first to embrace it fully.

It's probably patronising to assume that the older generation of Iraqis don't understand or appreciate democracy. But in any case, the first thing you need on that logic is a working democracy for anyone to embrace. Which has to be accomplished in the face of the above-mentioned problems.